Top 1200 Free Software Quotes & Sayings

The QSM Software Almanac is an invaluable resource. It establishes a norm for software projects, including best of class, worst of class and averages. In addition, it profiles the state of the art of software construction and enhancement. I wish I'd had this wonderful reference book years ago.

However, writing software without defects is not sufficient. In my experience, it is at least as difficult to write software that is safe - that is, software that behaves reasonably under adverse conditions.

While free software was meant to force developers to lose sleep over ethical dilemmas, open source software was meant to end their insomnia.

The idea of free software is that users of computing deserve freedom. They deserve in particular to have control over their computing. And proprietary software does not allow users to have control of their computing.

Software production is like any other production the preceded it, no raw materials are required, no time is required and no effort is required, you can make a million Copies of Software instantaneously for free and its very unique about that.

There are "extremists" in the free software world, but that's one major reason why I don't call what I do "free software" any more. I don't want to be associated with the people for whom it's about exclusion and hatred.

Software is like sex: it's better when it's free.

Every decision a person makes stems from the person's values and goals. People can have many different goals and values; fame, profit, love, survival, fun, and freedom, are just some of the goals that a good person might have. When the goal is to help others as well as oneself, we call that idealism. My work on free software is motivated by an idealistic goal: spreading freedom and cooperation. I want to encourage free software to spread, replacing proprietary software that forbids cooperation, and thus make our society better.

There's only one trick in software, and that is using a piece of software that's already been written.

There is no neat distinction between operating system software and the software that runs on top of it.

High-quality software is not expensive. High-quality software is faster and cheaper to build and maintain than low-quality software, from initial development all the way through total cost of ownership.

The more money Automattic makes, the more we invest into Free and Open Source software that belongs to everybody and services to make that software sing.

I got bitten by the free software bug in February of 1998 around the time of the Mozilla announcement.

Android is a major step towards an ethical, user-controlled, free-software portable phone, but there is a long way to go.

The challenge with Postfix, or with any piece of software, is to update software without introducing problems.

The software patent problem is not limited to Mono. Software patents affect everyone writing software today.

I came out of an electronic music scene that based all its music on software. It was a real boys thing, a real testosterone thing - software and the relationship between music and the software - to the point where it was like a closely guarded secret.

Software is a reflection of our own mind. And as our software improves it will not only take on the patterns of our minds more closely, but it will also pick up the energy of our minds; in other words, I think that software is alive.

When you develop software, the people who write the software, the developers are the key group but the testers also play an absolutely critical role. They're the ones who ah, write thousands and thousands of examples and make sure that it's going to work on all the different computers and printers and the different amounts of memory or networks that the software'11 be used in. That's a very hard job.

Shareware tends to combine the worst of commercial software with the worst of free software.

I started a software company with a couple other folks. It went public. We made plenty of money. And I thought it was this incredible mission, but in fact, we sold software to Haliburton; we sold software to Frito-Lay and Pepsi and all these companies that didn't necessarily do good things.

It's clear that other problems such as [...] the domination of business over government, science, thought, and society, are much bigger than non-free software.

I'm not interested in offering software for free of charge. That's because I myself am one of the game developers who, in the future, wants to make efforts so the value of the software will be appreciated by the consumers.

I'm not of the opinion that all software will be open source software. There is certain software that fits a niche that is only useful to a particular company or person: for example, the software immediately behind a web site's user interface. But the vast majority of software is actually pretty generic.

When it comes to software, I much prefer free software, because I have very seldom seen a program that has worked well enough for my needs, and having sources available can be a life-saver.

Writing non-free software is not an ethically legitimate activity, so if people who do this run into trouble, that's good! All businesses based on non-free software ought to fail, and the sooner the better.

Software is like sex. It's only good when it's for free.

If in my lifetime the problem of non-free software is solved, I could perhaps relax and write software again. But I might instead try to help deal with the world's larger problems. Standing up to an evil system is exhilarating, and now I have a taste for it.

Paying isn’t wrong, and being paid isn’t wrong. Trampling other people’s freedom and community is wrong, so the free software movement aims to put an end to it, at least in the area of software.

I obviously think that freely available software can not only keep up with the evolution of commercial software, but often exceed what you can do commercially.

Like many older fans of Free Software and Open Source, I have discovered that it is really only free in the sense that the time you spend on it is worthless.

Why shouldn't we give our teachers a license to obtain software, all software, any software, for nothing? Does anyone demand a licensing fee, each time a child is taught the alphabet?

Yahoo is free, it's fast and it's Web-centric. AOL is slow, it costs money and requires proprietary software.

Although the most advanced software innovation may take place in big cities with research universities, there is a lot of work concerning the application of software to business processes and the administration and maintenance of software systems that can be done remotely.

I named my software 'EMAIL,' (a term never used before in the English language), and I even received the first U.S. Copyright for that software, officially recognizing me as The Inventor of Email, at a time when Copyright was the only way to recognize software inventions, since the U.S. Supreme Court was not recognizing software patents.

A refund for defective software might be nice, except it would bankrupt the entire software industry in the first year.

My parents had a software company making children's software for the Apple II+, Commodore 64 and Acorn computers. They hired these teenagers to program the software, and these guys were true hackers, trying to get more colors and sound and animation out of those computers.

Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.

Whether it's Google or Apple or free software, we've got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes.

The free software community should be supported more widely. I’m totally in solidarity with what they do.

Free open-source software, by its nature, is unlikely to feature secret back doors that lead directly to Langley, Va.

The single aim of my life is that every child is: free to be a child, free to grow and develop, free to eat, sleep, see daylight, free to laugh and cry, free to play, free to learn, free to go to school, and above all, free to dream.

I think that freely available software can not only keep up with the evolution of commercial software, but often exceed what you can do commercially.

Today many people are switching to free software for purely practical reasons. That is good, as far as it goes, but that isn't all we need to do! Attracting users to free software is not the whole job, just the first step.

Free software' is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of 'free' as in 'free speech,' not as in 'free beer'.

Free software is software that respects your freedom and the social solidarity of your community. So it's free as in freedom.

There's a fundamental problem with how the software business does things. We're asking people who are masters of hard-edged technology to design the soft, human side of software as well. As a result, they make products that are really cool - if you happen to be a software engineer.

The only people who have anything to fear from free software are those whose products are worth even less.

The use of pirated software in China is really quite a sizeable loss to our software producers.

As the commercial confrontation between [free software] and software-that's-a-product becomes more fierce, patent law's going to be the terrain on which a big piece of the war's going to be fought. Waterloo is here somewhere.

Software is eating the world, but AI is going to eat software.

Uruguay is one of the biggest producers of software. We are breaking with the neoliberal model. We do not believe in free trade.

Defect-free software does not exist.

With software products, it is usual to find that the software has major `bugs' and does not work reliably for some users... The lay public, familiar with only a few incidents of software failure, may regard them as exceptions caused by exceptionally inept programmers. Those of us who are software professionals know better; the most competent programmers in the world cannot avoid such problems.

Apple's advantage is that it designs and builds software together, so if the software isn't excellent, it does the superlative hardware a disservice.

In the free/libre software movement, we develop software that respects users' freedom, so we and you can escape from software that doesn't.

We also exchange oil for software technology. Uruguay is one of the biggest producers of software. We are breaking with the neoliberal model. We do not believe in free trade. We believe in fair trade and exchange, not competition but cooperation. I'm not giving away oil for free. Just using oil, first to benefit our people, to relieve poverty.

Once GNU is written, everyone will be able to obtain good system software free, just like air.

Software patents are dangerous to software developers because they impose monopolies on software ideas.

There is a strong movement towards increased accountability for software developers and software development organizations.